Have you ever asked a serious songwriter what a given song is “about”? I’ve tried a few times and I can’t say I’ve ever come away particularly satisfied. More often than not the response is some form of asking me what I think the song is about. That sort of exchange makes me think that maybe good songwriting is about capturing a certain universality, words that point us in a direction but then end up meaning different things to different people. Not to be unkind but I’ve always thought with some notable exceptions that weaker songwriting is so literal there’s no way to participate in the experience – a “this happened then that happened” kind of thing. Sure, there are some songs that are clearly about something, but even then they’re often written in such a way that people can take away whatever they may happen to need.
An example is the Stephen Stills’ song “For What It’s Worth” (Stop, Listen, What’s that Sound), which he wrote when he was with Buffalo Springfield. It came out in the ‘60s and it sure sounds like an anti-war song or a song about some of the more energetic protests that were going on in American cities at the time. The truth is that it was inspired by what were called the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots in November 1966 – a fairly pedestrian series of conflicts between young people expressing themselves and the community establishment and police who were trying to curb their enthusiasm
Whatever the song was “about,’ it ended up being a pretty effective soundtrack for a lot of other stuff. Stills himself has said in interviews that a lot of people think “For What It’s Worth” is about Kent State, though it predates those events by four years.
The single was released on Atco Records in December 1966, and peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the spring of 1967. It was later added to the March 1967 second pressing of their first album, Buffalo Springfield. Funny thing is that the title was added after the song was written, and appears no where in the lyrics.
This is a song that screams, ‘this was the sixties,” whatever specific event acted as its inspiration.